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Wi-Fi Patent Victory Earns CSIRO $200 Million
bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports the patent battle between Australia's CSIRO and 14 of the world's largest technology companies has gained the research organization $200 million from out of court settlements. CSIRO executive director of commercial, Nigel Poole, said the CSIRO were wanting to license their technology further, stating that he 'urged' companies using it to come forward and seek a license. 'We believe that there are many more companies that are using CSIRO's technology and it's our desire to license the technology further,' Poole said.'We would urge companies that are currently selling devices that have 802.11 a,g or n to contact CSIRO and to seek a license because we believe they are using our technology.'"
Don't forget that CSIRO are a research organisation like PARC to pick an example in the USA.
Nobody likes a patent troll but I'd rather see CSIRO win a case like this than say Microsoft or IBM.
Pat on the back for CSIRO. One of the ways government-owned research organizations can expect to survive is by monetizing inventions - when companies like Lucent, Buffalo, Linksys, Apple etc. all make a killing off this stuff and didn't invest in its development it is only fair they are forced to pay up.
It was also the first time the research organization had seen a surplus in its financial reporting http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26209952-12377,00.html
Idiocy. CSIRO is nothing like a patent troll. CSIRO developed the technology...
Can someone please justify why we should consider the CSIRO to be a patent troll? They are an actual research organisation (a taxpayer-funded one at that); they don't exist just to file patents and make claims on them. Why are people dismissing them as trolls?
Yup. Isn't this *EXACTLY* why patents *REALLY* should exist? Hi - we've developed and tested a new technology, here it is, and here is how to use it. Please pay us money for the privilige.
Good on them, and hopefully we'll see some more great work from them in the future.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Except that they aren't patent trolls - they are the Australian Government's science organisation - Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), they have been in this battle for quite a while.
Read up on the WLAN stuff here http://www.csiro.gov.au/science/wireless-LANs.html
Then get back to us when you think that inventing wireless networking technology is easy and doesn't warrant the possibility of being patented.
Because they have no idea perhaps?
Isn't this an indication that the system is severely flawed when someone pops up very late to the table and claims that they own it?
[...] Softwares and methods are too easy to re-invent all over again, and who can tell if a certain solution has been available before and then silently put to the grave for one reason or another?
Speaking of trolls, you are one yourself. Before you mod me into oblivion, hear me out.
In your post, you seem to claim that (1) CSIRO is a patent troll; and that (2) the patent is a software patent, thus is unethical. Both claims are patently false. (ha ha)
For starters, to address claim (1), CSIRO is not a patent troll. What is a patent troll? A patent troll is an organisation that exists only to accumulate patents (and make a profit off royalties). CSIRO is not a patent troll! They are an Australian Government-funded organisation that does real research. They actually researched and patented the technology back in the early '90s. (Source)
To address claim (2), the patent in question is not a software patent! Thus the entire basis for your argument...
Softwares and methods are too easy to re-invent all over again, and who can tell if a certain solution has been available before and then silently put to the grave for one reason or another?
...is completely baseless. The patent in question covers the duplication and redundancy of radio waves, so it is obviously not a software patent. Basically the patent covers the way modern WiFi works, in that instead of serial (just one radio wave with error correction), parallel and redundant streams are sent, which allows you to have much greater bandwidth without losing the reliability. (And yes, that source again)
Are you referring to the CSIRO, or the people posting here who claim they [the CSIRO] are patent trolls? :P
- Chuq
but because the name is too close to CISRO that it would confuse a jury
... looks like a jury wouldn't be the only one confused.
- Chuq
Cisco aren't on the list because they already have a licence for the tech for which they pay royalties.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Cisco is absent because they are a valid licensee. http://wifinetnews.com/archives/2008/10/different_interpretation_of_buffalo_csiro_patent_appeal.html
Can someone please justify why we should consider the CSIRO to be a patent troll? They are an actual research organisation (a taxpayer-funded one at that); they don't exist just to file patents and make claims on them. Why are people dismissing them as trolls?
Because it's slashdot. You would be lucky for the majority of posters to read the the summary let alone any background info. Congratulations to the CSIRO for their success on this - in spite of having their funding savaged. Though the technology was patented in 96 so the r+d was possibly done before it became a target of budget cuts.
From TFA:
HP, Apple, Intel, Dell, Microsoft and Netgear bringing cases against CSIRO in an attempt to have the research organisation's patent invalidated.
Does anyone else think these companies are the real trolls?
So CISCO was using CSIRO technology without licensing it? Shame!
ah, so I should be sending CSIRO the medical bills for my wifi allergy shots!
That certainly helps explain their router prices! Good to hear of a company doing it the proper way. Many companies try to only respect IP law when it benefits them.
Er, according to this article:
What "savaging" are you talking about?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Duh.
Though the way so many American companies have been allowed to transform themselves into brutal, antisocial organisations speaks more of a failed regulatory climate than an inherent failure of the businesses themselves.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Why? I would say in my opinion, because there isn't anything "novel" about what they did. I'm sorry if a person can create the same thing independently of, and never having read or seen anybody's work then how innovative is it? I have recently managed to create a completely reconfigurable computer complete with an I/O bus (which is what allows physical pins to be remapped via software) with nothing more than a high school education. I imagine though somewhere out there is some fancy research facility being well funded to do exactly that. There is nothing magical about what one person does people; anybody can do anything. I won't pay them squat. I will simply quit using anything WiFi for the time being. I think there is something better out there we could use, and besides if it isn't using radio then we don't need any stinking licenses from the FCC. =)
Are they worth it? How many great inventions are not coming to market, either because of fear of being sued or because some asshole is sitting on a patent for the one thing you need to make your new invention work - and if you try to make anything even resembling his widget, boy you're in deep shit? How much more expensive are everyday products we buy because of patent trolls? This really isn't that much different than malpractice lawyers (ambulance chasers). Doctors have to get insanely expensive insurance because you know some dumbass is going to sue you for something really stupid and the trial lawyer is going to take 60%+ of the extortion money.
Seems the same when developing *any* tech these days. It is a damn mine field. Some obscure firm or individual is going to come out of the woodwork *after* the technology is common place, and claim they have a really vague patent on some really obscure sub-assembly that just happens to be critical to your invention - which you came up with, completely unaware anyone else had any similar ideas. I don't know that this is the case here specifically, but it seems like this is the operating procedure for patent trolls.
So companies like Intel, IBM, etc have to spend insane amounts of money - passed onto us in the form of higher unit costs - patenting sometimes really stupid things so no one can sue them, and hiring armies of lawyers to either try to defend the company from trolls or waste time trying to figure out if the hanging chad which really is nothing like joe troll's patent your researchers dug up, could come back to bite the company in the ass.
Look, I get that inventors aren't going to always have the capital to build something now, or the manufacturing capabilities, so it takes time to get either one of those things together to get your invention from concept to product. But for crying out loud, to claim damages for patent infringement, shouldn't you have to be able to actually show that you lost something, that you have damages, that you at least have paperwork demonstrating your effort to bring your product to market? Isn't that the point of a patent, so that you have the right to market your idea without someone stealing it? These asshats who are nothing more than shell organizations and no assets beyond a cellphone and a patent portfolio are ridiculous.
It saddens me to think that if the patent system was as screwed up today as it was when Edison and Westinghouse were vying to bring electricity to homes, we'd all still be sitting in the dark - because the discovery/inventions would have been lost to the energy of fighting over patents, and probably still be tied up in litigation.
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
And even then I suspect most Australian tax payers would like CSIRO to fund itself to the degree it can and would think it reasonable that the actual users of a technology would pay where that is feasable.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
What do you bet there are a few alternatives coming down the pipe soon? IBM, Apple, Intel, everybody coming out with the 'better wireless networking' technology.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Dit they get an assignment from the public to research and develop this technology?
In other words, was this developed for the greater good of humanity, or because someone had an itch??
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Wow, you have no fucking idea. You didn't even get through the first sentence of the summary.
So how do research organisations exist, if not by licensing their research outcomes?
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Government-owned organizations are paid for by taxes. Why should I pay once for the invention by taxes and then again through licensing fees?
They are nothing alike. PARC is a private, corporate research lab. CSIRO is a public, government funded organization.
I'm not so sure. It's not my area, but this patent sounds like it might be an engineering solution, a simple application of known techniques, instead of an invention. The fact that a standards body decided to use this technology (either not knowing about the patent or deliberately ignoring it) also suggests that this is not actually a new technology.
Can you explain what you think is novel and unobvious about this technology?
Wireless networking was developed by amateur radio operators, not by CSIRO. By the time CSIRO filed its patent (1996), you already could buy WLAN hardware commercially. CSIRO patented some specific techniques that happened to be present in several standards, but it's not even clear whether what they patented is an engineering solution (not patentable) or a true invention (patentable). That's why companies decided to challenge their patent in court.
Hint: the very first line of the summary is "iTnews reports the patent battle between Australia's CSIRO and 14 of the world's largest technology companies has gained the research organization $200 million from out of court settlements." Now how much US taxpayer funds do you think have been involved in this?
CSIRO exists because it's publicly funded. It's publicly funded because it's supposed to benefit the public and create research results usable by everybody.
This details precisely what CSIRO is supposed to do. Note that 8a refers to Australia rather a lot.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The patent system is the troll.
A non-adversarial way of promoting the advancement of the arts and sciences would remove the basis for these sorts of wasteful, expensive court fights, just for starters. No one would have to fear being sued by trolls or threatened by huge patent portfolios. Wouldn't have to weigh whether using hundreds of tiny little ideas, even those ideas one came up with independently, is worth the risk.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
That brings up a somewhat interesting question. Personally I prefer an independent research institute who'll licence their patent to anyone for a reasonable fee than a company who'll use a patent to create a monopoly for their own product offerings.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
From the summary, doesn't it bother anyone that Nigel Poole isn't the director of anything. He's the director of an adjective or adverb. "Director of Commercial".
Director of Commercial WHAT? Commercial Espionage? Commercial Litigation? Commercial Applications of Research? Or maybe he's Director of Television Commercials? Who can tell?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Yeah..........unless you're developing weapons, it's often hard for science agencies to get government funding as a guarantee...
Between the falling angel and the rising ape
Hi - we've developed and tested a new technology with your tax money, here it is, and here is how to use it. Please pay more money for the privilige of using what was yours already.
Fixed that for you.
From my cursory reading, it appears that the technology was independently rediscovered. As far as I know, this isn't a defence in patent cases (except if you discovered it first but didn't publish), but IMHO that should be changed. If you actually gain from using a patent it makes at least some sense that you should pay, but if you independently develop something without knowing about the previous patent, you're just being punished for not being lucky.
I can see plenty of problems with changing this, but I doubt it can make patent cases all that much more complicated.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
How much more expensive are everyday products we buy because of patent trolls
Or because of legitimate patents: A patent is designed to increase the price of a product to the highest possible level the market can bear.
For drugs this means a 1000% mark-up at least, based on the price drop if drugs go 'generic'.
for Fast Fourier Transform and multi spectrum rf echo cancelation!!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The location doesn't matter. If the taxpayer paid for it, I think the taxpayer should be able to use it.
Er, what?
Are you suggesting that, as a taxpayer in one country, I should have access to and use products and services paid for by another country?
What the fuck are you smoking, because it sure as hell needs to be made illegal.
It's a valid patent? How does it compare then if BSD patented their government-funded work?
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
Hahaha oh wow. Thanks for reinforcing stereotypes. :D
Ezekiel 23:20
And I'm pretty sure CSIRO's experiments on puppies!
I can make shit up too. Fuck off, they deserve to be paid for their contribution to technology today. CSIRO has made some amazing developments and licensing their discoveries is an excellent way to get more funding, as long as they're not charging absurd amounts.
Ezekiel 23:20
Cool, so you don't mind if I leach off your country's social security then do you? I pay taxes here so I must deserve it.
The government announced that CSIRO's funding allocation for next year will be reduced by a one-off amount of $200 million.
The savings will be used to fund a series of very large plaques in school gyms where, by pure coincidence, most polling booths are set up during federal elections.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
I think Australians would be perfectly happy that an Australian government research organisation funded by their taxes was also making additional income licensing their technologies to overseas and multi-national companies.
I know I am.
Advanced users are users too!
Hi - we've developed and tested a new technology with your tax money, here it is, and here is how to use it. Please pay more money for the privilige of using what was yours already. Fixed that for you.
So everyone who's using WiFi is paying Australia taxes?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
CSIRO exists because it's publicly funded. It's publicly funded because it's supposed to benefit the public and create research results usable by everybody.
It's publicly funded, yes, but by the people of Australia,, not of the people of other nations. In that sense CSIRO are absolutely entitled to obtain license fees from international companies. I'd also argue that they are entitled to collect fees from Australian companies since that should then allow them to decrease their funding from Australian tax payers.
More at issue is not the fact that they have the patent, but that they're trying to suck money out of everyone by participating in the IEEE and not signing a Letter of Assurance. A Letter of Assurance doesn't mean that you won't make money or won't sue, just that you'll charge reasonable royalties (IEEE's all about co-operation). Their requested royalty rates are several dollars per sale, which is stupid when you're talking about a technology that should be used in the cheapest devices. They signed a letter of assurance for 802.11a but kept silent on g and n. Then they started suing when g was adopted.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
Interesting viewpoint. How much does Oz contribute to DARPA for the use of internet?
Or to England for Penicillin?
According to the wonderful BBC documentary, "Breaking the Mould",, Florey, the Australian heading the team, was completely against patenting the technology needed to produce it in sufficient quantities, even though one of his colleagues insisted he should.
Because it was needed during the war, it was shown to a US pharmaceutical(?) company who did patent the process, which meant that the original inventors would have to pay for their own invention.
CSIRO is only about 50% publicly funded. The rest comes from patents, product sales, and other commercial work. I personally think it should be 100% publicly funded (so it could give its good work to the public for free), but that's another argument.
I take it you are apposed to foreign aid?
If the taxpayer funds the research, the taxpayer owns the results. Nobody should be able to patent something that came about because of taxpayer-funded research.
Furthermore, patented technology shouldn't be allowed to make it into "standards." "Standards" should be open and unencumbered. It's fundamentally anti-competitive to standardize on encumbered technology.
I take it you are not apposed to foreigners jumping border to get health care, education and welfare.
Could you tell me who manufactured that computer of yours?
I'm not for letting patents mess around with science and technology, but they do have their place. A lot of members of Internet communities seem to damn patents and copyrighting because it is so harmful to software engineering. And yes, I DO think that copyrighting and closed-source development have no place in software engineering, because keeping that kind of work hushed up does not benefit the science. But as an Australian studying both physics and software engineering I feel that there is a big difference between propriety software that has everyone on the Internet outraged and the licensing of technology. I feel that the CSIRO are an organisation that Australia can be proud of and some of their research will benefit human kind long after any patents have expired. If I end up working for the CSIRO I would want my work to be licensed. Not for the money or because it would be my "right", but because it would help with the continuation of excellent scientific research in Australia and Earth as a whole. If, however, I end up working as a programmer, I would rather give my code away and go hungry than have it all hushed up for the sake of a money hungry corporation, because transparency in software is beneficial to the science. That is not to say that software shouldn't be licensable or sellable, just that it should be visible - as the CSIRO's technologies often are. So before you all start squabbling over who should pay an extra five bucks for a wiFi card, think about what you're buying for the future. Outrage over copyrighting that stunts progress is fair, outrage over investing a few dollars into the advancement of technology is petty.
Could you tell me who manufactured that computer of yours?
If the manufacturer gave it away for free there would be a point, otherwise that company can pay for the technology they are happy to charge us for.
THE INTERNET.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
It's their invention, so their decision what to do with it. However it's often better for an R&D specialist to keep doing R&D and let manufaturing specialists license and make the stuff.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Or we can throw away this whole "competition" thing and start working more towards a "cooperative" situation. Oh wait, am I expecting people to agree and work together? Sorry about that. Must have lost my head.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
I couldn't agree more. My taxes helped pay for the research, and continue to help fund the work of the CSIRO in a multitude of areas. The fact that they can supplement their Government budget by licensing the technology they develop is a great boon to science - especially when budget cuts can wreak such havok on worthwhile research endeavours. As an Australian, I'm not as concerned about "paying twice" for the technology when I know it's not going to patent trolls - it's going to a research organisation doing science for purposes other than profit. For the rest of the world, you're only paying for it once. Stop complaining.
And that kids is how I met your mother.
The tech companies seem to believe that CSIRO's patent is obvious and thus shouldn't have been granted. Is there any merit to this claim? Everyone seems to be either jumping to CSIRO (all the people with mod points seem to be on their side) or the tech companies defense without even thinking about the actual patent they are trying to enforce.
I thought that WiFi technology was in use outside Australia. I had no idea we were so far ahead of the pack.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
So, I see all of the posts coming to the defense of CSIRO, and I get them. I truly do.
However, there is still one thing I do not get: Why is CSIRO going (and why have they been allowed to go) after the companies selling the final piece of complete, end-user hardware in a shrink-wrap box, rather than the chipset manufacturers themselves? Isn't it Broadcom, Atheros, Intel, Ralink, Realtek, etc., who failed to license the technology? It seems to me that the company who takes the chipset and slaps their name on the front of a plastic box that contains it has become an unwitting victim in all of this. Most of these companies don't even really have their own designs. The original Broadcom reference design was tweaked by Gemtek and then rebranded by Linksys, Buffalo, and many, many others, for example...most of these companies buy their stuff from an ODM and barely do any of their own actual engineering and are just sales and marketing warehouses.
So why are all the actual chipset manufacturers getting off scott-free?
-- Nathan
Let's make our own wireless standard, give it away to CSIRO and then charge them for it some years later. Yeah, screw those guys!
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
...because the patent was not on "sharing bits over radio", it was on some extremely clever and complex technologies that were developed, intially for radio telescopes, and then extended to the difficult problem of fast communications inside of an echoey and interference filled environment.
Just because this is now done inside a chip that costs a few euros doesn't make it simpler, and just because 99.999% of the people using it (99.9999% on slashdot) have no idea what is going on in their little box, it doesn't mean it isn't worth other companies paying for the patents.
From memory CISCO got an early license because they bought the startup from CSIRO that set put to exploit that patent and related others. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Yes it is publicly funded, but the idea of the public funding is to allow people to do research to see where it goes. Commercial companies tend to be very focused on what the problem is, and how to solve it, where as research for research sake, you can find solutions or improvements without intending to. Not everything the CSIRO, (or it's equivalent bodies in other countries) research will result in a solution. Not all of the solutions will be useable or marketable. But the ones that do produce money to do more research, due to the extra money available to buy equipment, and pay money to research staff. Think about all the things that have been found either accidently or with no practical solution in mind, including penicillin, the electron, x-rays, etc. Without applied research where would we be?
So because the software is burned to a chip that makes it acceptable?
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
Your dating is a bit off. Try Charles Frederic Gauss in 1805 for the first documented description of FFTs, just mostly forgotten for 160 years. It didn't become popular widely until 1965. After which it became used all over the place in hardware and software. I studied FFT application in college engineering and programming classes. FFTs have been common knowledge in engineering for 20 years or more. Making it into a hardware chip might have been new, but certainly not novel.
Everyone wanted to put FFTs into chips, since they began making chips and certainly DSPs. I'm fairly sure many video cards implement FFTs and probably 90% of all DSPs. Not sure when CSIRO did this, but it must be longer than any US patent (Thompson implemented a VLSI FFT chip in 1979) would be valid for. The University of Goettingen has Gauss' works on-line you could go there to verify it. But then you'd probably have to learn German and maybe Latin (although, IIRC they translated the Latin stuff). There were others doing FFT algorithm in the span from 1805 to the 1965 popularization you speak of, although you're off by about five years there, too..
I haven't read CSIRO patent so don't know if it was novel or not, but you're wrong about the FFT part in many ways.
Can someone please justify why we should consider the CSIRO to be a patent troll?
Because they are Australian, and all Australian government organisations exist to hurt and legally injure real people.
It's possible that the licensing fee is/was higher, and they're just taking what they can get. Perhaps the 200 million is for to-date violations, and now those companies will also be licensing at a higher cost?
Because of the confidential terms, we won't be able to confirm either scenario.
They're NOT patent trolls at all. $200 million isn't much, and CSIRO can make good use of it.
But there is a problem when major industry standards like 802.11 a,g and n can somehow end up patented, after years of work and negotiation by many different companies and individuals, who now have to pay to use their own collective, public work. Whether the problem in this case is carelessness by the companies, or corruption of the U.S. patent system, or both, I don't know.
In any case we do have a problem, and it could bite much worse in the future.
-- John S. James www.RepliCounts.org